There are a number of products on the market which will dispense rolls of coins or quantities of bills under direct or remote control. These products may contain bill or coin acceptors and may dispense the coins or bills in response to coins and bills being accepted as a way of providing change for supporting a retail or similar operation. In response to security concerns, these products are usually housed in a secure Class B safe enclosure. In many cases, tubes are used to store rolls of coins or a number of bills rolled into a tube. In some cases, bills will be dispensed from bill dispensers which dispense bills from a holding cassette in response to control electronics.
The dispensing safe may be the responsibility of someone other than the person in the facility, such as a store, that may be loading the machine. Often times, an armored car carrier company or an offsite facility owner is responsible for the money in the safe. Agents or employees used to fill and collect money from the machine will have full access. Typically, there is nothing to insure the dispensers are properly loaded other than the reliability of such personnel.
The typical products currently available suffer from a number of deficiencies limiting their usefulness. In particular, these products suffer from high cost. They have no or limited knowledge of the actual value of money in the safe. They have limited flexibility to adapt to the amounts of coins and bills optimally required for a given site, or the ability to adapt to substantially different seasonal requirements, and have high service requirements.
It is becoming increasingly important to ensure the amount of money in an accepting and dispensing safe be known absolutely without being dependent on a route or service person counting correctly or being honest. It is not unusual for an armored car carrier company to be responsible for the money in the secured accepting and dispensing safe. As an alternative, an owner of several locations, such as a number of convenience stores, may want to have adequate change on hand so employees do not lose valuable time going to a bank for change while having total knowledge and control of the money in the safe. Additionally, as space is often at a premium in retail outlets such as convenience stores and fast food restaurants, the size of the safe should be kept small while allowing the maximum flexibility for storing various coin and bill denominations and quantities.
An approach of one current technology can be seen in Meeker U.S. Pat. Nos. 5,725,081 and 5,883,371. This class of deposit and dispensing safes use a bill acceptor for accepting bills and a dispense mechanism for dispensing rolls of coins or bills. In these patents, each tube column of a plurality of columns is dispensed at the bottom of the column and dispenses to the front of a secure box. Thus, the size of the secure box must be sufficiently large to hold all the rolls of tubes on its face. This results in a very large and heavy product with limited capacity. Thus, the dispensing mechanism is substantially limited in the quantity of rolls of coins or bills it can hold as it requires the front face of the secure box to be large enough to hold all the desired columns of tubes. Additionally, the number of tubes in the dispenser is not known other than by counting them. This approach results in a significant security issue as the person loading the machine can count incorrectly, as a result of human error, or purposely misrepresent the number of tubes in the dispenser. Thus, an accurate accounting of the money in the secure housing is not possible. Additionally, there is no verification of the tubes being dispensed which further leads to frustration by the user and possible disputes between end users, store owners and parties loading the dispensers. Thus, the security of the system is subject to needless compromise. The amount of bills put in the tubes is also a subject of potential security issues as well, as someone has to manually count and stuff the tubes.
In a similar approach, Keith, in U.S. Pat. No. 6,213,341, also teaches a series of tube columns similar to those of Meeker, but adds a series of sensors in each column to “see” each of the tubes in the column. This allows the electronics to know how many tubes are in the unit, but does not know that the correct tube or even a filled tube is being used. This technology suffers from the ease with which the tube count can be fooled, and hence the value of the money in the unit derived therefrom. It also suffers from many of the other issues described above relative to the potential inaccuracies of the approaches of the Meeker patents.
Another approach is described by Scott in U.S. Pat. No. 5,984,509. Here, Scott teaches a preloaded cassette for holding rolls of coins. The rolls are dispensed employing a complicated electromechanical technique in an effort to dispense at high speeds. Additionally, Scott teaches the counting of rolls in each cassette to determine the value of money in the cassettes. This technology has a number of limitations including high cost, an assumed value by counting the space needed to house a number of rolls leaving the value of each roll suspect, and a very large secure box to house the dispensers. Additionally, there is little flexibility with respect to stocking the number of rolls of coins needed per location.
Another prior art technology employing coin hoppers is described by Lamoureux in U.S. Pat. No. 5,938,072 and similarly by Siemens in U.S. Pat. No. 7,111,754. These patents address the use of roll coin hoppers to house large numbers of rolls of coins. The rolls are routed to the bottom and dispensed one at a time. Both teach the use of a sensor to detect the dispensing of each roll of coins. These approaches suffer from high cost, large unit size, knowledge of what was dispensed, but not what remains in the machine, and limited flexibility to control the number of rolls of coins needed in a given location.
A further approach to roll coin dispensing is described by McGunn in U.S. Pat. No. 7,591,361. In this approach, a row of vertically standing tubes of currency are pushed forward via a pusher plate. The number of tubes is determined by the position of the pusher plate. This approach measures the position of a pusher plate and can easily be defeated by putting empty tubes, incorrect tubes, or spacers in with the other tubes in a given row. Also, as in other approaches, an accurate determination of the total value of the tubes is dependent on the correct tubes being placed in each row.